Last Words
by setFIREtomyHEART
Summary: Raoul has passed, and has left his heir Charles a very strange letter, one which will change his entire world... entirely Kay based.


Well, this is my first whack at a Phantom fan fiction, though this account was created to write it (as evidenced by the user name…) so please be kind. I didn't realize that this was kind of a tired theme (at least, it now seems that way to me after surfing the POTO section off more thoroughly) until I looked just now, so hopefully I breathed some life back into this sort of plot line. I assure you, this one is different. Well, Thanks for reading, and don't forget to review!

Crimson

The sun shone brightly down onto a small London townhouse. Too bright. At least, that's what Charles thought. The sky too blue, the grass blindly and perfectly green. Charles thought that is should be an abysmal day. After all, his last guardian, his father, had passed yesterday, and he did have the right to think that it should be pouring. He lay in bed still, not having moved since seven the previous day, though it was four in the afternoon. He had drifted between sleep and wakefulness, never really getting rest. He heard a knock on his door. Hesitant. He rolled over, covering his face with a pillow to block the sunlight peeping through his curtains.

"Please…" he said plaintively, his voice rough, "Please go away." He heard the door open and close quickly and quietly.

"Charles, you need to get out of bed." It was his old governess, Mistress Catharine. She must have come to town went she heard his father was on his deathbed. He didn't remember seeing her last night. It had been a blur of grief and faces trying and failing to console him. To hear her so tired sounding, so beaten down, it almost broke his heart again. Mistress Catharine had been the most formidable aspect of his young life, a steadying rock.

"No." He burrowed deeper into his covers. She sighed, and Charles heard a crinkling of paper next to his head. He opened his eyes, and a letter with the de Chagny crest rested on his pillow. The twenty five year old sat slowly, pushing down his bedclothes to a tangle at his feet. He ran a hand through his dark hair, staring with unfeigned curiosity at it, but he had to will himself to pick it up. Something inside slid to a corner. His name in his father's script was on the back. He looked curiously at his old governess, who looked surprisingly demure.

"He said that when he passed, I should give this to you. It must be his will." she said distractedly, smoothing a wisp of hair back into her graying bun. "I'll leave that to you, Master de Chagny." She quickly saw herself out. Charles watched her leave.

_Master de Chagny._

He didn't want his father's title. That would make his death final. Ultimate. He wasn't ready to feel his father's burden yoked across his shoulders.

He looked back down to the letter in his hands, which felt suddenly heavy. He ripped the top open, and saw two pieces of paper in it. The first was his will, which Charles sat on his bedside table to examine later. The second of was letter, addressed to him.

**_Charles, _**it said,

_**Now that you are reading this, it means that I have left this world. I leave everything to you, including my title in France. Don't grieve at my passing, it is simply the next step in life, and I shall see you again, someday. But before that day comes, there is much for you to learn. A certain thing, in fact, that I have begrudged telling you know. I felt for many years, that you didn't need to know, that I was paying my debt, so to speak. I never meant to tell you, but recently I have begun to think otherwise. I cannot explain all in this letter, so I give you this key. It goes to you mother's bedside drawer. Open it and there is a file inside. Read the contents, please, as a last gift to me. But what ever is inside, know that I will love you as my son, always.**_

_**Your father**_

Charles read it several times, trying to understand his father's strange letter. He looked inside the envelope, and saw a small brass key, which he emptied out onto his palm. It felt unusually cold against his skin.

In spite of his reservations, he rose from his bed, and padded down the hall to his parents' room. He knelt by his mother's beside table, where a small portrait of his parents sat. His mother looked pensively into the distance, while his father smiled at the camera. He inserted the key into the lock, twisting it several times. It clicked, and slid soundlessly open. It smelled deeply of roses, and had various trinkets spread about, but he would look at them later, his father's last words had given him a burning curiosity. He at last found the folder, and lifting it carefully from the drawer, for it was thick and heavy, he sat on the bed and flipped it open, stopping dead at the first thing he saw. It was a pair of portraits, a man and a woman. The man looked like him, save the age lines etching his face. Charles stared at it with wonder, and time seemed to cease as he looked at the man with his face. The second portrait confused him also. It looked like his long passed mother, yet it didn't. The woman's eyebrows were high with disdain, and her mouth was twisted into a haughty coy smile that his mother couldn't duplicate, even if she tried. This could not be Christine. He lifted them aside and saw an old, dog-eared journal with a weather-beaten cover. He opened it carefully, and the spine creaked with age. The first yellowed page bore a date long ago, and it was written in his mother's neat sweeping hand. He read, 'This isn't a journal, not in the accepted sense of the term…'

He devoured the words of his mother, eagerly learning about Erik, the mysterious man he had heard once about from his father, but never again. Then, when he neared the end, he found an entry that upended his whole world.

**_Charles left for his first day of boarding school. The house seems so empty without him. He's so much like his father, except the face, that it's painful sometimes. When he was first learning piano, I used to sit in the hall and listen, and it was like hearing Erik again. I'm sure Raoul knows by know that Charles is Erik's child, he bears so many resemblances…well, Raoul's calling for me in the garden, so I'd best go._**

_**Christine**_

He stared at the words "Erik's child', willing them to make sense, to change into an account of how his mother got five new dresses, to shout at him in Latin, something to make him wake from this hypnotic feeling that had occurred when he read the words that shook the very foundation of his being. Suddenly, the many loose ends of his life together and made a tapestry, albeit a strange one. His mother had looked at his with a strange wistful smile, almost like someone wondering what could have been, how distant his father had been in his childhood, the strange cat that had devoted herself to him, its diamond necklace….

Charles found he had nearly stopped breathing. The hypnotic feeling slowly faded, and was replaced by a strange yearning, so strong it all but scared him. He wanted to go to Paris.


End file.
